Longing for last act of oil tragedy

As this is written, act one of the Gulf of Mexico tragedy continues, agonisingly, to unfold.

The people of the region keep hoping to leave behind the terrifying explosions and ghastly loss of human life, the dread invoked by black jets billowing endlessly from below and the floating oil spreading over an ever-growing area.

We want to move on to act two, which will feature many dirty shovels, corpses of birds and people crying over the loss of a landscape they love.

Act three has yet to be written; it will employ an enormous cast of lawyers and last for decades, but there will be some healing, we hope. That's what we need to happen as soon as possible, but we can't seem to get the damned thing plugged up.

It was my observation, in satellite images of this inexorable spread, that led me to conclude in early May the rate of release being cited by BP and parroted by our coastguard - 1000 barrels a day - was preposterous.

After initial pressure, the rate was upped to 5000 barrels per day - still too low by my estimation by at least a factor of five.

BP, however, refused to make any effort to estimate the flow, claiming this could jeopardise its response efforts, which could not possibly be any greater, it avowed.

What baffles me is not that BP should seek to minimise the magnitude of the spill. After all, some of our laws would make it liable to penalties of US$1000 ($1475) per barrel released.

What's puzzling is why the company's spokespeople cleave to statements that are so readily refuted.

Casting BP executives as cardboard cut-out villains does not get us far though. Whatever the courts may find about BP's culpability the real cause is our demand for oil and our refusal to pay its true price. Right now, America wants to do something to fight the spill. However, if you suggest we should double the price of fuel and use the revenue to rebuild our transportation network, the general response is suspicious silence.

Facile comparisons do not do justice to this drama. If the climate scientists are even partly right, it could turn out to be a dress rehearsal for greater crises: humans instigating vast change we struggle to control.

Amid such struggles, minimising the spill rate for PR purposes does not stop the leak; engineering stops the leak. Expunging oil from your publicity photos does not clean the beach or tell you how badly damaged was the ecosystem; science does that. In the struggle between spin and science, we had better hope science wins.

Ian MacDonald is Professor of Oceanography at Florida State University.

- Observer